| Will the BING and Yahoo! search deal affect your SEO? | |
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After months of talks, vacillations and the necessary scrutiny by the anti-trust regulators BING and Yahoo! have finally received the greenlight to hop into bed together, effectively turning what used to be a three-way in search into a tug-of-war between Google which has 70% of the search market in the US and 85% of the global search market and BING-Yahoo! who now have a 30% share. BING search results will start to show up in Yahoo! searches towards the end of this year or early next year, depending on how the market shapes up and Yahoo! will take over a slice of the search advertising from Microsoft, giving the computer giant a slice of the profits. On the face of it this all makes sense. Yahoo! will be free of the cost of running indexing and processing data centres and Microsoft whose own search advertising model never really took off will benefit from the refined one Yahoo! already has in place. For webmasters the news however is not that great. Microsoft’s search engines have always suffered from slow indexing and poor crawling and though BING has made huge inroads in terms of the quality of MS search results it’s far from being Google, especially since the Caffeine update of the latter. This means that whereas before you could rely on your site being indexed fast by Google, a little less speedily by Yahoo! and a lot later by BING now you will be at the mercy of BING’s speed and can only really rely on Google for speed, efficiency and traffic. As a search engine optimizer working with clients who are always short of time I have always advocated focusing on Google first and any other search engine later and the results have proved this strategy to be effective time after time in over 600 separate websites. So, this is no exception. Whatever you do to your website make sure that it registers on Google first, focus all your efforts on improving results there and worry about BING/Yahoo! much later, if there is any time to worry left in your busy day. Good news for advertisers Those of you, however, who use Google’s adsense as a viable means of earning money might want to cast our eye towards Yahoo’s advertising model as it makes perfect sense, has every bit as much flexibility as Google’s plus it opens up a corner of the market where Google ads are less common. Good news for innovation Over the last year Google has been looking over its shoulder but has been unsure who to focus on. Yahoo! had a larger market share than BING but a poorer search engine, BING brought innovation but still lagged behind in results. Now, at least, the target is clear and it is inevitable that Google search engine engineers will spend their time refining the Google search changes started by the Caffeine update.
David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to help you with a specific SEO problem on your website consider our SEO Consultation offer.
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